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A familiar headline from the past has reclaimed its position in the news and across the blogosphere today.

Will iDevice maker Apple purchase the once formidable smartphone king Research in Motion? On a day like today, it's hard to deny the basement-bargain price Apple could possibly get for the struggling BlackBerry maker.

On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that RIM's inventory of BlackBerrys and PlayBooks - that is, unsold product that the company can't get rid of - may now be worth more than $1 billion dollars. Internal numbers and research at Bloomberg show that the value of RIM’s in-house supplies grew 18 percent just in the last quarter.

And the problem is only growing worse for RIM as the BlackBerry maker can't find its once substantive footing against the likes of Apple and Google. Android and iOS-powered devices now account for the overwhelming majority of new smartphone purchases around the world today, with RIM barely registering on the radar in comparison.

“Clearly this stuff isn’t selling,” Neeraj Monga, an analyst at Veritas Investment Research, tells Bloomberg. Nonetheless, Monga is keeping a "buy" recommendation on RIM’s stock. Why? Because now more than ever it appears that RIM will be sold to a big bidder. “Despite all the writedowns they’re taking on the inventory, these inventory levels are not dropping.”

Cause once RIM is owned by apple, the BB enterprise server features will be all integrated in the iphone, and with it .. the iphone would be business no.1 choice.. iphone till now has no proper enterprise / business management tools .. more for a personal use .. maybe it is time to by some cheap shares in RIM

I always thought bb data was rly compressed and more efficient to push through networks and their own servers.
I remember a news article slating apple and android for chewing through massive amounts of bandwidth whilst BB data is less stressful on mobile carriers...
People always bang on about bb encryption too? I'm not too sure but they say on routers it comes out encrypted...
Oh and bbm imagine merging that fanbase with iMessage it'd make buying an iphone more attractive...
They'd also get all of the bb servers throughout the world...

I always thought bb data was rly compressed and more efficient to push through networks and their own servers.
I remember a news article slating apple and android for chewing through massive amounts of bandwidth whilst BB data is less stressful on mobile carriers...
People always bang on about bb encryption too? I'm not too sure but they say on routers it comes out encrypted...
Oh and bbm imagine merging that fanbase with iMessage it'd make buying an iphone more attractive...
They'd also get all of the bb servers throughout the world...

Don't kid yourself!! There would be only one thing apple would want and that's the patents and nothing else!!

Cause once RIM is owned by apple, the BB enterprise server features will be all integrated in the iPhone, and with it .. the iPhone would be business no.1 choice.. iPhone till now has no proper enterprise / business management tools .. more for a personal use .. maybe it is time to by some cheap shares in RIM

Not true, the iPhone has a tone of business features and has since iOS4.

Businesses and Government Agencies have been converting to iPhone for a while now. The iPhone now does basically 95% of what a deadberry can do now. Frankly it's RIM's own fault, they always refused to push the bar and make better OS's and interface software. The BB Desktop is based on IntelliSync, technology that is 15-20 years old, and was never that good to begin with.

Three things: padding Apple's existing patent portfolio, preventing those patents from ending up in the hands of Google, Microsoft, and/or Samsung, and the underlying technology behind BIS and BBM.

And I'm not so sure about the last one.

OT: RIM has almost nothing of value from Apple's perspective. They don't have that many patents--and those of use to Apple (since patents relating to trackballs and physical keyboards on phones and such aren't exactly a valuable tool in Apple's arsenal) can probably be purchased or licensed separately from the rest of that debt-laden, inventory-flooded, dysfunctional company. It just defies my logic as to why Apple would do this.

Why in the hell would they want to buy some floundering, dead in the water company that has no inspiration in its devices? They clearly enjoy resting on their laurels at RIM. The fact that they stock piled their devices hoping for demand runs counter to how Apple manufactures.

I can't see this happening. The only thing I see is the IP which is useless to Apple but it keeps it out of the hands of Google and Microsoft. Apple is doing just fine attracting the business market without buying RIM. Rim seems to be sinking in that category pretty quickly by themselves.

I always thought bb data was rly compressed and more efficient to push through networks and their own servers.
I remember a news article slating apple and android for chewing through massive amounts of bandwidth whilst BB data is less stressful on mobile carriers...
People always bang on about bb encryption too? I'm not too sure but they say on routers it comes out encrypted...
Oh and bbm imagine merging that fanbase with iMessage it'd make buying an iphone more attractive...
They'd also get all of the bb servers throughout the world...

iOS and Android kill BB OS in bandwidth because they are used for content consumption. BB is for email and BBM, which is infinitesimally smaller in bandwidth usage. Content consumption on a BB is nonexistent compared to the competition.

Apple may be able to make use of the BBM technology and servers, though.

I seriously doubt any of the BB technology would be of any use to apple or anyone else for that matter. It isn't like connecting a garden hose - you're talking about two fundamentally different technologies which were not built to communicate with each other.

Best case scenario is apple gets patents for physical keyboards, which they won't use, and stockpiles of playbooks.

Mind you RIM is in a similar situation to Apple back in the late 90's...but then apple invented the iPod

As i've said before....RIM doesn't innovate...because all it's Phones look the same. Don't get me wrong.....My first Smartphone was a BB Curve 8310..and it was the BEST THING..I've ever owned. I loved the BBM interface but it was an EDGE phone & when 3G came along it took RIM..a WHILE..before they could get a Model out..and it was wack that they never stepped up with their popular model which i thought was the 8310...so.i'm sorry if RIM goes the way of the Dodo bird.It's a tough world out there in the tech world. Apple,Samsung,Moto,Nokia(to the extent) are ruling and RIM is the Titanic slowly going under.

RIM is still giving you the same phone you could purchase years ago..that's the problem no innovation as we all know. Now why would apple buy them? Put them out of their misery. BB is a dog hit by a car on its last breath..waiting for the police to put it down..seriously. Apple would get the patents so google and others could not. Smart move i guess and it puts apple another step above competition. The security bez server stuff is BS. I mean how many business actually utilize one these days? Most use iOS or Android..just saying.

As i've said before....RIM doesn't innovate...because all it's Phones look the same. Don't get me wrong.....My first Smartphone was a BB Curve 8310..and it was the BEST THING..I've ever owned. I loved the BBM interface but it was an EDGE phone & when 3G came along it took RIM..a WHILE..before they could get a Model out..and it was wack that they never stepped up with their popular model which i thought was the 8310...so.i'm sorry if RIM goes the way of the Dodo bird.It's a tough world out there in the tech world. Apple,Samsung,Moto,Nokia(to the extent) are ruling and RIM is the Titanic slowly going under.

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i have never owned blackberry but have friends that too. very popular in latin america due to them offering blackberry plans only that don't require data plans. very inexpensive. also the lower end hardware is very cheap.

my impressions is that Blackberry had a chance to create facebook before facebook. they were half way there. Their messaging client is very social oriented and people trade images and status back and forth and it's very reliable. Never any lost messages.

closest thing to BBM is Whatsapp.

I wish RIM would license their protocol so the civilized world can communicate with Blackberry users on their own turf